When someone Thank you or when you thank someone else or appreciate that person or they appreciate you, how does that make you feel? Well, my hunch is if you're showing that appreciation yourself and makes you feel good about yourself and the other person and if you receive it from someone, you feel good about yourself. That's just the way we're wound. I've never found people pushing back to being encouraged or appreciated, or having someone express their gratitude toward them, nor have I found anyone who's ever pushed back to the concept that they feel better about themselves when they demonstrate gratefulness to someone else. Well, in this module, we're going to focus in on gratefulness on Thanksgiving. Because it's essential to dealing with stress the use stressful versus distressful way.

So instead of complaining or griping or being a victim or being frustrated or angry or bitter or depressed, we're going to focus in on developing the right perspective toward life, just life in general, by thanking, or by demonstrating gratitude. It's gonna be a fun journey. In this session, we're going to focus in on this particular topic, and I'm going to give you an overview of where we're going to go throughout the module, but the whole modules on this concept of thankfulness or Thanksgiving and gratitude. I love what Marcus Cicero said. He said, gratitude is not only the greatest virtues but the parent of all others. And others have said that in in the moral dilemma of life or the theological or philosophical arena of life.

Many have said that thankfulness or gratitude becomes the core to many other virtues in their lives. And I think that's certainly true. Because when you have a thankful spirit, then you're able to live with greater integrity. You're able to treat people with dignity, you're able to live according to the principles that guide you, you have an optimistic outlook toward life. And I love what Gk Chesterton said he said, I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder, listen to that, again. Gratitude is happiness doubled by one wonder.

The power of gratitude is it allows us to dwell on those things we appreciate. But we have great wonder over those things we appreciate whether it's a sunset or our health or a friendship or an option. opportunity, or just the moment when we have gratitude or that we're filled with wondered, we experience it, we feel it. And then it's not only experiencing thankfulness, ourselves, but it's also giving it away. I love the words of William Ward, who said feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like, it's like wrapping a present and not giving it. In other words, if you're going to wrap the present, give it away.

So if you're going to feel gratitude towards someone, give it back to them. Well, we'll talk about the attitude of gratitude here in this session, and throughout this module, but we'll also focus in on it more related to people as we get into the module on having a right perspective toward people by building them up and the power of building other people up and gratitudes really central to that. Now, in this session, we're going to talk about the the, the overview, we're talking about the power of thinking, we'll talk about the process of thinking, we'll talk about the practice of thinking. So, actually, throughout the entire module, we'll unpack each one of those. The Power of Thinking is really the benefits of thinking it's thinking through, what does it mean to be thankful? And how do we, how do we benefit from Thanksgiving and I'm going to share with you very specific, scientifically driven studies that drive home the power of the benefits of Thank you.

And then in another session, we're going to deal with the process of thinking so how do we go about thinking, what's the process of being thankful? How do we create a habit or a way of life of being thankful? And we're going to give you some tools and resources and exercises actually to do that. And then finally, we're going to talk about the practice of thinking. And here we're going to not only give you in our session on that, specific tools and resources on how to do that, but we're gonna make available a number of those in your resource notes, through links and also through some PDFs and then also some in your study notebook as you work through your worksheets. Now, what I'd like you to do as we get ready for this module is to take some assessments.

So one of the the assessments is really an online gratitude quiz. And it assesses your thankfulness. By the way, these are things we've taken the the best ones we found out, but you'll be able to get response on your thankfulness and you can actually have others participate with you. But take that assessment again, in your resource center, you will find that link available. And then we want you to take a second assessment that is in the form of a PDF and it's a quiz that's been put together by one organization that helps you think through your gratitude by asking more yes or no questions. So you'll come at them from different areas, but it'll give you a sense of how how filled with gratitude you are how thankful you are it's It's a baseline for us to develop this process.

And I want you to look at those things, and self, analyze yourself. And if you're in our private Facebook group, which hopefully you are, we'll start discussing that the things you learn the questions you have, and we'll start unpacking that, and coaching and do some group learning together as we work through this particular process. And then, here's my action step for you today. The action step is for you to watch the video on happiness and its relationship to thankfulness. Now, this video is a TED talk. It's put together by a gentleman named Sean anchor who specialized in this area, and he shows how so often in life, it's not going after things and getting things that make us happy.

It's being happy by being filled with gratitude having a positive mental attitude, having a use restful outlook on life every. It's not a it's a challenge. It's not a catastrophe. It's a possibility it's not a problem. And he gives you some of the research behind this. It's a very entertaining video, I want you to watch this and I want you to think about your happiness and how your happiness and how you're dealing with stress is enhanced properly when you use stress fully respond by being filled with gratitude, and thankfulness.

Now, this is all just a setup to kind of create the environment to finish up this module and it will cover several other sessions in this module that will be very practical as we deal with the power of thinking, the process of thinking and then the practice of thinking okay, let's get hoppy. Looking forward to it.